The "Janus Interface": A Meditation on the Cosmology of Peter Whitehead

The eye cannot see itself; we cannot project from ourselves, and contemplate as an object our own contemplating faculty or appreciate our own appreciating power.

Thomas De Quincey

The eye, like consciousness itself for Thomas De Quincey,¹ is transparent to itself, a transparency that constitutes a resistance, a motif common to Peter Whitehead's films as well as his novels (see figure 1), where the transparency of the medium, celluloid, is matched by a self-referentiality between and among his texts where the same characters appear and reappear. Without a knowledge of all the texts (which constitute a series), the characters are opaque. This transparency, born of recurrence, a kind of sine qua non of his achievement, makes no space for Husserlian "bracketing," by which an object or character might be reduced to a thing-in-itself, which speaks in and for itself, irrespective of context or supplementary categories of the understanding. Whitehead's recycled characters in film or novels are always both heirs (from previous novels) and leave traces in later work. They are conscious of a serial existence or the potential for perpetual reincarnation: a role in a collective memory that renders them vulnerable to sharing historical and cinematic space.

But De Quincey's argument notwithstanding, we continue to try to see ourselves seeing or contemplating ourselves contemplating, as long as self-consciousness is deemed to define us as humans. The impossibility of second-order perceptions would imply that self-reflection invariably corrupts—hence the presence of "interferences," a kind of communicative "static" that prevents exposure to contingencies in Whitehead's world. This problematic poses its own strategies of resistance and justification; why shouldn't our very resistances be as vulnerable to resistance, a second-order resistance, as it were, to match the inability to appreciate ourselves appreciating or contemplating? Peter Whitehead's strategy for coping with the problem resembles that of De Quincey insofar as his films often present the viewer, as De Quincey did his nineteenth-century readers, with a characteristic narrative structure. At the beginning, the narrative flow of the images creates an exterior story with enough markers to give the film the appearance of a documentary. The films then repress the documentary into a world of associated or remembered images—often from antecedent mnemonic archives. The films often conclude not with the emergence of the repressed docu-narrative, but with images so "submerged" that the seemingly "abstract" images of natural processes, textures, and surfaces remain as a kind of residue. The putative "natural" world is never entirely natural but always already inflected, as if it constituted a grammar.

Figure 1.

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 2009

De Quincey's problem, albeit inverted, became my own when I received an unsolicited letter in my mailbox at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1996 from Peter Whitehead. Academics—unlike Michael Schlieman, also known as Milton Crookshank, a per sis tent presence in Whitehead's recent films and novels—have a kind of endowed institutional immunity against letters whose formats do not participate in the Manichaean bifurcations of academic consciousness: acceptance or rejection of submissions to publishers or deans. We academics participate in a bifurcated world of positive (acceptance) and negative (rejection), and like lovers perhaps, file correspondence under these easily categorized designations. Our Cartesian nomenclature never allows for the emptiness, the absence, of the palimpsest, a communicative channel that also functions as an obstruction. "Traces" are difficult to file on the desk or in the mind, precisely because they exist as a differential from any easily recoverable origin or intention, but only in reproduction. We typically can depart from our categorized space (not Whitehead's ever-regenerating space) only by receiving an unsolicited message, a signal, that there are others whom we cannot directly know who nonetheless "speak to us" as a dialogic partner—as a ghost familiar with our being. These good letters never really speak, but create the illusion of speaking by a combination of presumed familiarity and punctuation marks, which indicate...